Vice President Kamala Harris has established that she is anti-family. Hers is a stance that plagues the full body of the Democratic Party and makes it not only against the family but an antithesis of it. 

Various positions define the Democrats in opposition to family formation, whether these pertain to child care, the environment, immigration, or marriage. Harris’s most telling example lies in her border policies. For years, she has held a record of decriminalizing illegal crossings, closing detention centers, and offering illegal immigrants benefits such as free healthcare. This approach makes for a basically comfortable lifestyle for would-be criminals, while its harm to American employment is unavoidable.

Working parents might barely sustain their families because Harris-supported illegal immigrants take the jobs that would help them get by. Many others might avoid marriage and children altogether as untenable under the conditions. The Harris campaign undermines the same working families whom it claims to support, and will not offer any word otherwise.

But their family problem manifests itself in more than their specific policies: How they approach the American political structure mirrors the Democratic Party’s disrespect for the familial unit.

That is, the family is the fundamental political unit — so explains Aristotle in his Politics. In the most obvious sense, it is because the people who make up a polity spring from a family, and this phenomenon sustains civilization. Through sustained iterations, what began as only a family has evolved in stages to multiple governmental levels that cooperate as one large-scale society. Its citizens learn order and charity in the context of the family and then take what they have learned to the body politic. 

The second reason is less linear and more concentric. Because family life is so natural to humanity, it “accentuates the political nature of man.” Life in a family is the most natural thing, and so it instructs existence in every other realm. It is not natural purely in an animalistic sense, but as it deals with the human condition: A political life purposed for the common good of its members is far more compelling when one has his own family members as primary objects of goodwill. 

One draw of democratic life, then, is the immediacy found in the family. Working alongside fellow citizens at broadly the same level and aiming at the same goals are simple modes of relating to others as to a sibling; without familial prefiguring, they would fall flat against self-interest. Strategies and preferences may (likely do) differ, and a little infighting keeps this out in the open. But because family members live so closely together, dishonesty is not sustainable and personality is not easily hidden. Further, success in deception would do more harm than good: All at once it tears at existing bonds while stopping new joys from emerging.

It is by this deception that the Democratic Party’s failings are most blatant. Americans do not have a clear view of who is running their country, and it is by design. After the grand coup of President Joe Biden from the presidential race, the undemocratic practices of the Democratic Party became clear. White House staff lied about the president’s abilities for years, then cunningly replaced his nomination with Harris’s when the chance arose. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has said it must be that “Harris has been calling the shots” for a while now, and he is probably correct. 

Towards a more specific perspective, President Biden’s relationship with his son, Hunter Biden, is a telling example. If the members of a democracy reflect sibling-like relationships, there is also a sense in which the United States president has a parental role. He is no king for whom “the friendship between a father and his sons parallels the friendship between a king and his subjects.” Still, President Biden stands as our head of house. But he is only a puppet, and the general public’s relationship with its president is hardly even in existence, full of dishonesty and failure. 

Little difference occurs within Biden’s relationship with Hunter. Parents are not free of culpability regarding the choices their children make. President Biden and his wife are certainly not to blame per se, but it cannot be denied they have had significant influence on Hunter Biden’s very troubled life. If not, the claim of their parenthood would be mere passive custodian. Second, it is lies that have come to define their relationship. Biden lied about information regarding his son’s trial, and even about his interactions with Hunter. It makes sense that the private turmoil of the Biden family has come out as a result. Does the same not follow for how Biden and the Democratic Party as a whole conduct their relationship with the American people?

Biden should (structurally, not optimally) be our “head of house,” but appearances deceive. Statistics demonstrate that children struggle without fathers, and still, the Democratic Party opts for a broken home: The governing structure that is to reflect the familial unit completely mocks its predecessor. Like the family, the American government was constructed intentionally. But the current administration does what it pleases and publicly presents something different. If a family were to appear as some entity other than it is, it would suffer considerable private tension. It would be working for what is outside of itself, rather than working from the good within itself. This administration is no model for the family, and indeed actively works against the robust concept of the family. 

While robust, it is also the most basic. As such, there is nothing into which to retreat when things go poorly. Not so for government affairs. Any errors that elected officials make — whether from poor estimation or ill-intention — trickle down into American lives and hide there as symptoms to identify. When the Democratic Party acts exactly in ways that prove dishonest, it pushes the effects of its errors downwards to smaller and smaller units of society. This kind of flippancy hurts the family on an economic level, but also constitutes a rejection of the goodness it offers in its form. 

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Part of the goodness that any observer can learn from the family is unconditional love. There is no shortcoming that lessens the value or irreplaceability of a parent or child. It is not that the American government can exactly mimic family life, but there are standards of respect that should be consistent through both. From the moment he flunked his June debate with former president Donald Trump, Biden became “political deadweight” on whom his party turned. Familial love, on the other hand, contains no unbearable burdens because the burdens are borne with love. Biden lost worth almost entirely. While the intensity of love within the familial realm will not transfer to that of the strictly political, there is a reason that the Biden-Harris switch seems so unnatural and undemocratic.

Perhaps their definition of “democracy” is malleable: It exists as a “means of expanding novel individual rights.” It is about the “doors of opportunity” we have to “shape our destiny.” By this rhetoric, the Democratic Party denies the immense freedom found in limits — ones that allow the human person to flourish, and ones that the seemingly strict boundaries of the family exemplify. Theirs is a sad reality we see play out in America’s afflicted state. As long as the Democratic Party campaigns to undermine the political form handed to them, there is no possible world in which it has the good of the family in mind.